I have some distressing news to share this. We learned from his daughter Louisa that longtime CounterPunch correspondent Franklin Lamb died this weekend of congestive heart failure.

Lamb had written for CounterPunch for 15 years. For most of that time, Franklin lived in Beirut, but he traveled widely across the Middle East. He reported from inside Palestinian refugee camps and in Tripoli during the NATO bombing of Libya. Lamb was a human rights lawyer, who had taught law across the Willamette River from me at Lewis and Clark College before moving to Lebanon.

Patrick Cockburn, who knew Franklin well, said the last time he saw him was in a hotel room in Damascus, where he was trying to arrange medical care for a young Syrian girl who had been shot by a sniper.